03 October, 2007

We import components from Taiwan, but recent orders for VO products from that country might be the result of a post on Wingsfab's Vault and Style.

Here is the translated post, and here it is in the original. Beautiful workmanship Wingfab. And the photos throughout the blog are great, especially the seafood.

I was just thinking about going to the Taipei bike show in March. Maybe it's time to rub shoulders with the buyers from Trek, Cannondale, Specialized... "You're from Velo what?"

The second photo is of a prototype VO bottle cage. It's not perfect, but the manufacturer now understands the issues. This particular factory does not make bike parts and the owner might never have closely examined a high-end water bottle cage. It's hard to explain that quality, not cost, is the most important thing. They think that if they raise the price by 20% we'll go elsewhere because that's what most other clients would do. So we keep stressing that cost is secondary and they probably keep thinking that we're very strange Americans indeed.

I'm from Taiwan originally, but have spent the last 16 years in N. America. After reading the blog in chinese and then in the machine translation, I laughed out loud because the translation is, well, kind of off, but actually conveys what he meant to say, somewhat.

The bottle cage is a variation of a very old TA design. The ears do allow you to insert a big coffee mug, etc, but it is normally used one handed, like any other cage, with a normal sized bottle. Scroll down a few dozen posts and you'll see the plans and a detailed description.

BB, The Porteur racks will probably arrive later this week or early next. The Courier racks are a bit delayed because the shop needed to fabricate a new bending jig to get that big curve on the front perfectly even.